Louisiana Senate slams door on reconsidering older split-jury convictions 

Persons imprisoned in Louisiana through unconstitutional split-jury verdicts still won’t have an avenue to challenge their convictions following a state Senate vote Wednesday.

Republicans in the chamber overwhelmingly rejected a bill from Sen. Royce Duplessis, D-New Orleans, to allow people convicted by non-unanimous juries before 2018 to petition for their cases to be reviewed. The proposal failed on a 9-26 vote despite having the support of the Louisiana Republican Party and GOP Congressman Clay Higgins, who’s long campaigned on a tough-on-crime platform.

Louisiana and Oregon were the last two states to allow split-jury verdicts in the prosecution of violent felonies. Voters in Louisiana amended the state constitution in 2018 to eliminate non-unanimous juries, though it didn’t apply to such convictions before the change.   

In 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled split-jury convictions were unconstitutional, but justices didn’t determine whether their ruling would apply retroactively to older cases in Louisiana and Oregon. While the Oregon Supreme Court decided those incarcerated under old non-unanimous verdicts could seek remedy, the Louisiana Supreme Court did not.

“We have an opportunity right now in Louisiana to remove this stain, because right now we are the only ones who are wearing it,” Duplessis told senators before the vote.

The Louisiana District Attorneys Association constituted the most significant opposition to the bill. Duplessis said he worked with the group to address some of its concerns, but senators against the measure said it would be difficult for prosecutors to retry cases that, in some cases, would be decades old.   

“You have to acknowledge the practical impossibility of retrying a case 10, 15, 20 years later,” Sen. Alan Seabaugh, R-Shreveport, said. “Evidence is destroyed, witnesses have died, witnesses have moved.”

Seabaugh, who’s an attorney, told Duplessis that if he supported the possibility of new trials for persons who were convicted on 10-2 jury verdicts, he should also be in favor of letting district attorneys retry cases where defendants were acquitted on 10-2 verdicts. Such a scenario would constitute double jeopardy, a principle protected by the 5th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that prevents a person from being tried twice for the same crime.  

Ahead of the final vote, Duplessis read from a letter of support for his bill from Higgins, in which the 3rd Congressional District representative urged the “swift passage” of the measure. 

“You could not have told me in my 42 years on this earth that I would have a letter from Congressman Clay Higgins supporting a bill that I brought,” Duplessis said. “I’m not sharing that for laughs. I’m sharing that to show you the gravity of this moment. This is serious.”

The Promise of Justice Initiative has been at the forefront of attempts to have Louisiana give persons incarcerated on split-jury verdicts a chance at new trials. In a statewide poll the group conducted earlier this month, almost two-thirds of the more than 1,000 respondents said they supported judicial relief for those convicted by non-unanimous juries. 

Before the final vote, Duplessis mentioned the results of the poll to senators, and two-thirds of them rejected his bill.     

The history of split-jury verdicts goes back to the Jim Crow era, when states passed laws to silence the voice of newly enfranchised Black citizens who were allowed to serve as jurors for the first time. Louisiana approved its split-jury law in 1889

It was a New Orleans case that led the U.S. Supreme Court to declare split-jury verdicts unconstitutional five years ago. Lawyers for Evangelisto Ramos challenged his second-degree murder conviction of a New Orleans woman that resulted in a life sentence. In a 6-3 ruling, with Justice Neil Gorsuch writing the majority opinion, the court found that the 6th Amendment requires an unanimous guilty verdict in criminal cases.

This report was updated to include the accurate name of the Promise of Justice Initiative.